Biology 202 Web Paper 1

 
“How do you feel today?” my therapist asks me at the start of our session.
“Anxious,” I reply.
“Want to try some EMDR?”
I shrug. “OK.”
It’s not like anything else has helped to ease my social anxiety, except for psychopharmaceuticals.
“What’s EMDR?”

 In the current society, personality plays a large role in the society. People are often judged by their characters as much as their appearances. The ones with an outgoing and assertive personality are usually the favored ones who are more loved and respected by others. The shy ones are often ignored and misunderstood and become more self-abased.  Yet shy people should not be blamed for their particular personality. According to recent studies, shyness is naturally built into our brain. It is a mechanism for dealing with stresses. There are also researches, which show that too much shyness is caused by genes.

Neurocognitive linguistics offers an approach to linguistics which focuses on identifying the cognitive processes by which the brain acquires and uses language, the operations that underlie the language function, and the physical structures in the brain that account for language. Language acquisition represents the immense difficulties linguists have in explaining and proving assertions from the scarce linguistic data available today. Every cognitively normal child is able to, and if exposed to other speakers definitely will, develop and learn a language natively. This is because language is not a learned skill, but an instinct.

 Eve Gleichman

22 February, 2010

Neurobiology 202: Web Paper 1

Paul Grobstein 

Psilocybin, Hallucinations, and the Spiritual Enlightenment

Serotonin (5-HT) is a key neurotransmitter that regulates numerous functions such as appetite, sleep, memory and learning, mood, behavior, and sexuality amongst other operations of the central nervous system (CNS) (1). As such, its significant bearing on our lives is undeniable: with normal synaptic levels of serotonin, we can live as content, functioning human beings.

Over the summer, I struggled with gender identity issues—though I hate to describe it that way, both because it sounds like I’m pathologizing myself and because it felt less like a “struggle” and more like a long-needed exploration of some aspects of my identity that I’d heretofore neglected or perhaps repressed. I talk to some friends, did some research, and eventually “came out”—if that’s what it was—to a few people. Towards the end of the summer, I felt fairly certain that I wanted to be—would be happier as—a woman.

One night, a friend from out of town visited me, and we got into a pretty heated argument about gender identity. At the center of this argument was a simple question that he posed to me: how was it possible that I “felt like” a woman?

Normal.dotm 0 0 1 1222 5869 Bryn Mawr College 167 58 8558

Normal 0 0 1 1865 10631 88 21 13055 11.0

Liz Frontino                                                                                                                                                           2/23/10                                                &#16

 A First Look at Depersonalization and Derealization

Kate Gould